Well, I was getting bored and just googled my domain name. As I was browsing through the search results, I clicked on a Spanish site containing the word gofedora. I clicked on google’s “Translate this page” and was surprised by the result. Watch it yourself below.

Fedora 11 does have support for Broadcom wireless drivers, but it didn’t really work out on a friend’s laptop. Finally we got it working and I thought I’ll just note the steps down. Below are the three easy steps you need to take to make it work properly.

Step 1

Install needed packages

[root@fedora ~]$ yum install broadcom-wl wl-kmod

[root@fedora ~]$ yum install broadcom-wl wl-kmod

Step 2

Once the packages are installed successfully, reboot your laptop.

Step 3

Use the following command

[root@fedora ~]$ system-config-network

[root@fedora ~]$ system-config-network

And add a new wireless device wlan0 or whatever you want by filling the required fields properly. If you want the device to be managed by NetworkManager, you can do so while editing the device you just added.

Yesterday, AMD released ATI Catalyst™ 9.7 Proprietary Linux x86/x86_64 Display Drivers. I happened to checkout the website today. Initially I was very excited about it hoping that these drivers will work with 2.6.29+ and I’ll be able to use my ATI Radeon HD 3200 which is lying dead since a fortnight or so. I downloaded the drivers immediately and switched to Fedora 11 default kernel. Installed the drivers and checked the install log located at /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log. And I saw a failure. AMD disappointed me, yet another time 🙁

In case you happen to screw your graphics display while trying to install ATI drivers, use the following command to uninstall fglrx.

[root@fedora ~]$ /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

[root@fedora ~]$ /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

Well, I am back to square one. Have to wait for another month and I hope next release will have support for kernel 2.6.29+.

Mission

GNUMP3d is the GNU Streaming MP3/Media Server written in perl. Our mission is to setup GNUMP3d and stream audio over LAN or over internet. Below are the essential steps to install and configure GNUMP3d.

Install

Now gnump3d is installed on your system. Now you need to configure it according to your taste.

Configure

The configuration file is located at /etc/gnump3d/gnump3d.conf. For casual use, you just need to configure port, binding_host and root.

# Port to which gnump3d will be accessible via web interface or via a media player like xmms or winamp.
port = 1111# The IP Address where gnump3d will bind itself.
binding_host = 172.17.8.64
# If you want the stream to be accessible via a fully qualified domain name, set hostname variable.# You don't need to set this in most cases e.g. while setting up gnump3d on LAN.hostname = gofedora.com
# The directory where are your music files resides.
root = /stuff/Music/

# Port to which gnump3d will be accessible via web interface or via a media player like xmms or winamp.
port = 1111
# The IP Address where gnump3d will bind itself.
binding_host = 172.17.8.64
# If you want the stream to be accessible via a fully qualified domain name, set hostname variable.
# You don't need to set this in most cases e.g. while setting up gnump3d on LAN.
hostname = gofedora.com
# The directory where are your music files resides.
root = /stuff/Music/

Though you can skip rest of the configuration, you may try to explore other options. My gnump3d.conf file can be download from here.

Thats all you need to do to configure gnump3d.

Indexing

Now you need to index all you music collection (the audio files in gnump3d root). Run the following command to index

[root@fedora ~]$ gnump3d-index --verbose

[root@fedora ~]$ gnump3d-index --verbose

Run gnump3d

Once the indexing is done, you are all set to run gnump3d. By default gnump3d tries to index all files whenever you start it, to avoid this we need to use –fast option.

[root@fedora ~]$ gnump3d --fast

[root@fedora ~]$ gnump3d --fast

By default gnump3d runs in foreground. If you want it to go in background and run quietly, run it as follows.

UPDATE : I recommend using GitList instead of GitWeb. GitList is much easier to setup and has a better web interface. Continue reading this post if you looking for GitWeb setup instructions specifically.

Well, if you consider just the web interface and committing part for your project, thats all. But things can be fine tuned further. Below are few hacks!

1. Enabling nice urls.

By default the urls for browsing repository via git web are pretty crappy and difficult to remember. The RewriteRule and RewriteEngine lines in your Apache configuration file (/etc/httpd/conf.d/git.conf) takes care of that and produce nice and clean urls.

Try the ls-remote command now and it should succeed by producing all the branches and tags in the remote repository.

But there is a problem, you have to run the above command after every commit to the remote repository. To solve this issue, you can enable post-update hook for the project’s repository in gitweb. Use the following command to enable it.

The above command will update the server info automatically every time you commit.

Thats all you need to do for setting up gitweb. I hope this will be helpful.

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Note: These tricks apply to any Linux based OS. But I have tested them only on Fedora, so can’t say whether they’ll work on other Linux(s).

My current Fedora installation is now almost one and a half years old. Yes. I am still using Fedora 7 😀 I have Fedora 10 on my other machine. Coming to the agenda, my Fedora installation has grown beyond control and I have services from named, squid, drbl, privoxy, vsftpd, vbox*, smb and what not on a personal desktop. These services really force my system startup to slow down to more than two minutes. While shutting down, its very easy to just cut the power supply but while booting up I can’t help and it frustrates me. And what frustrates me further that I have 4GB DDR2 RAM and AMD64 X2 5600+ (2.8GHz x 2) and booting time is still more than two minutes.

Agenda

Boot Fedora faster using whatever techniques possible.

Remove the services from normal order and delay their execution to a later stage. So, services like network, squid, privoxy, named, vsftpd, smb etc. doesn’t make sense unless I am not logged in and using them. Let us start them after we have login screen.

Turn off all the services by using the command

[root@bordeaux ~]# chkconfig service_name off

[root@bordeaux ~]# chkconfig service_name off

where service_name is the service you want to turn off.

Now create a file /etc/startup.sh. Enter a line like this

[root@bordeaux ~]# service service_name start

[root@bordeaux ~]# service service_name start

for every service that you have turned off in the Step 1.1 and you want it to be running after your machine starts up. Now, your startup.sh file should look like this

Done!!! Notice the &s in both files. They are for execution in background so that a process can block boot process. You’ll observe a drop of 10-20 seconds in system startup time.

Problem with Hack #1 : The execution is not really parallel. It executes like a process in the background. So we can’t get the real advantage of parallel execution.

Hack #2 solves this problem. Now we don’t put processes in background. We use daemon forking to fork a separate daemon process which will start all the services for us in parallel. Here we’ll get the real advantage and startup time will decrease further.

There is a vulnerability in the way Google authentication service works. Whenever you login to any of the Google’s online services like GMail, Orkut, Groups, Docs, Youtube, Calendar etc., you are redirected to an authentication server which authenticates against the entered username and password and redirect back to the required service (GMail, Youtube etc.) setting the session variables.

Now, if you are able to grab the url used to set the session variables, you can login as the user to whom that url belongs from any machine on the Internet (need not be the machine belonging to the same subnet) without entering the username and password of the user.

The proxy servers in the organizations can be used to exploit this vulnerability. Squid is the most popular proxy server used. In the default configuration, squid strips the query terms of a url before logging. So, this vulnerability can’t be exploited. But if you turn off the stripping mechanism by adding the line shown below, then squid will log the complete url.

strip_query_terms off

strip_query_terms off

So, after turning stripping mechanism off, the log will contain urls which will look like this

Replace .co.in with your tld specific to your country. If you paste this url in any browser, it’ll directly log you in and you can do whatever you want to that account. Remember that all such urls remains valid only for two minutes. So, if you use that url after two minutes, it’ll lead nowhere.

At the time of writing this post Orkut, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Books and Youtube are vulnerable.

The other day I was debugging my drupal installation and had a look at the Apache error logs. And this is what I found 😀

[root@gofedora html]# tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23229)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23230)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23231)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23232)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23233)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23234)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23235)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23236)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23237)[Fri Nov 2821:00:162008][warn] long lost child came home!(pid 23238)